COLLOQUY: Minding the Gap: Music Education at the Nexus of Vocation and Leisure

The rapidity of those changes also led to greater concern about the mental health of our students and ourselves as well as all of those around us (everybody, in fact). Innocuous and routine went out the window as we had to look at new ways of interacting, working, teaching, conversing, and just generally being within our realities. Another purchase of a Hal Leonard method book and a headphone amp from Amazon and I was on my way. The very reason that we are music educators and music education researchers is the fact that we enjoy music and want to share that with students of any age or experience. Or, worse yet, that life, as defined in work-life balance, deals exclusively with responsibilities and actions devoted to family and the typical actions of daily life (cooking, laundry, cleaning, etc.) and does not include leisure and play at all, forcing us to carve out time for enjoyment and fun at the expense of either work or life.